Best and Brightest Kate Nelligan

The climax of the 1982-83 New York theater season was Kate Nelligan's withering performance in David Hare's Plenty as Susan Traherne, a bright young British idealist at the time of World War II who becomes over a period of twenty years a disillusioned, shrewish neurotic. As this ivorypale beauty with a silken voice and impeccable diction lacerates her husband, denigrates her country, and with austere detachment makes clear to everyone around her how hellish and meaningless the world has become, audiences watch in appalled fascination. Nelligan says that people who saw her play the part in London would recoil from her at parties. Nevertheless, the critics there declared her performance the best of the year, and in New York she received such acclaim that the production moved from the Public Theater to Broadway for an extended run.

"Kate convinces you of her interior life, and you long to find out what that is," says Hare, who directed her in London and New York. "I find that fantastically sexy." Indeed, in Nelligan you sense a character's potential; she reveals not merely what the character is, but what she might become.

Born in London, Ontario, Nelligan has appeared in PBS-TV's Therese Raquin and Measure for Measure and in such films as Dracula and Eye of the Needle. Her new film is Without a Trace.